wordfalls and scatters

You guys! I know that your friend feeds are pretty much entirely just me going: "ZOMG India is hard" "ZOMG India is great" every five minutes. Sorry! Given how things usually go, there's a reasonable chance that I will soon become too busy to deluge you with news.

But first!

I totally got some cash! All it took was about ten phonecalls, a heap of emails, three visits to a local bank, and quite a bit of being stern at people. I am never, ever, doing that again. If this wad of cash runs out, I'm going to sort out an alternative option. For now, though, I feel much more independent and less like I am needing my friends here to look after me with everything.

More importantly, though, on my final trip to the bank I went by bicycle. I didn't get lost, and I didn't get hit by traffic. And my bicycle is a "gentleman's" bicycle, so it is HUUUGE - I am as tall as standing on a chair! And I feel like I'm flying! I think I've worked out most of the Indian road rules, and I think I will mostly be okay riding around. (FAMILY! If you are reading this, don't worry! I will be careful and safe.) Plus also I have high visibility: everyone is too busy staring like crazy to accidentally crash into me. There are not a lot of women above school age cycling around, and there are especially not a lot of white women on Indian-style gentlemen's bikes cycling around grinning like lunatics. (A couple of guys shouted out at me, "Very nice! Very nice!", and I am choosing to interpret it as their whole-hearted approval of my enthusiasm for awesome Indian bicycles.)

Okay, now on with work. And eating delicious snacks. (I visited my friends' family last night, and they gave me a heap of delicious snacks to take home. Apparently, I am looking too thin. Also, they are lovely and always spoil me a heap.)

Yesterday I went to visit my family, which is one of the last trips I make that usually involves a car. So after some negotiation with my grandparents, it was decided that:
a) I could cycle to the train station from my place, catch the train up to joondalup, then cycle from joondalup station to their place instead of getting picked up, and
b) I was mad.

Family visits were nice, and it was good to meet Visiting Greek Cousin, although my Greek is still not up to conversation. Happily my grandparents are speaking to me in Greek more and more often, so I'm getting better.

Cycling back, I got up to the turn-off for "cycle to Perth" and suddenly decided that I would give it a go.

Highlights:
* I remembered to put on sunscreen!
* Asking directions from some Aimless Youth, one of whom was trying to hide his can of spraypaint behind his back. When I said I was cycling to Perth he was horrified.
* There is a path that mostly goes along the highway, but it takes all these weird deviations through suburban streets. They have a strange, quiet feel to them. I would have started to worry that I was lost, except that people in lycra kept racing past on shiny bicycles. One of these deviations went past an area that still had a few market gardens scattered around, and I ate some figs from an abandoned block full of fruit trees.
* I helped some strangers catch their puppy.
* When I was close to H's house, the next stop on my itinerary, an old Greek woman stopped me to tell me to be careful in the area. I spoke Greek for a bit, which was fun, and she told me that I should come to her house for dinner. (I declined.)
* I saw Lisa!

All in all, I am very proud of myself. After fiddling around with whereis.com a bit I worked out that I cycled around 47.5km yesterday, which seems like a lot. And it was, I felt, unnecessarily windy. And I'm fine today! Now I want to cycle everywhere, even more than I did before.

Yesterday was the culmination of a series of days in which the Real World got closer and more depressing.

( Cut for lots of waah about the world. )

I've cut back on my usual voluminous output of Online Stuff over the last few weeks, what with the Greek exam and the marking and the no Internet at home. Hopefully services will be returning to normal soon, and you can go back to wondering if you really need to read all of these blogs to be my friend. (You don't. There is no quiz.)

Anyway, time for an update. Things I have enjoyed lately:
* Cycling! I am cycling a lot less now that I live to uni, but I had a couple of good long cycles in the last week, one to Maylands and one to Inglewood. I like to cycle along at my own slow pace and listen to podcasts and maybe get rained on just a little.
* Crafternoons! It is nice to sit with ladies and eat biscuits and gossip and make stuff. And, on a related note:
* Free wool! Jessica Monster gave me a whole heap of wool to make a skirt with. I'm crocheting it. Should I just make a tube, or try to flare it out a bit? I have no idea what I'm doing!
* People! Oh my! I have so many lovely people in my life. Lately I have been fretting a bit, and feeling like I am less than lovely. I worry about things, like maybe I talked too much that one time. But I am trying to fret less.
* Jobs! Well, the job I got offered is now no longer the go. A bit sad, but I've applied for another job, and even if I don't get it I appreciated being forced to write a few pages about how wonderful I am for the application. Turns out I Know Things, and also Have Experience. Hurrah!
* Books! I went to the library and got as many books as I could carry. I just read the first one, and it had lots of lists in it. I liked the lists of 'things I got excited about as a kid'.

Today, I worked hard. I blogged and blogged, and then I researched and wrote a whole big section of the chapter I'm working on now. I felt so productive, and it was the kind of work where you put your head down and don't stop until you realise that it's snack/coffee-time.

Then, I thought I would round things up by looking at my 'everything so far, current draft' file, which I thought would make me feel even more productive. About 31,000 words. Okay. I've written many, many, more words, but this is the word count for my current draft (minus bibliography). Sounds like a lot of words. It's 79 pages: that is a lot of pages! But then I accidentally started thinking...a PhD needs around 80,000 to 100,000 words. Will I end up with enough words? That is a lot of words still to write! What if I finish it all and it only comes to, like, 60,000 words? What will I do then? And then I got a sick feeling in my stomach and had to stop thinking about it for a while.

Luckily, I had some photos of pandas to look at, courtesy of liz.

In other news, some things I have done lately are:
* Fret about people,
* Tidy things, with satisfying results,
* Craft origami things, also with satisfying results,
* Sail in windy weather, which made me feel like Captain Adventure because we 'took water in over the gunnel' (apparently),

That is all. I will go bicycle in the sunshine now, and it will be nice.

I have been busy. How unexpected! I am getting used to it, I think. I didn't get everything done this weekend that I wanted to. Here are some updates on my life:

Family:
My family continues mad, and I have been full to bursting with love for them. My mother has managed to find a way to see her astronomy club through the lens of politics, my father continues to play the accordion and probably wasn't joking about having started a secret livejournal, my grandfather is capable of deriving hours of amusement from a sweet potato sitting on a shelf, my brother has reached heights of hippydom that I can only aspire to, and my grandmother continues to declare in a loud voice that noone should ever get married.

I have been wanting to spend more time with all of them, but that seems to be the theme with me and people lately and time has not magically appeared.

Bicycles:
I am wishing for a site like whereis, but for cyclists. It would give you routes that avoid too many hills, and maybe favour routes with nice views. It should also have safety options, that would let you pick routes that don't go along main roads, or that only go through well-lit areas for night-time rides. I have been wondering a bit how difficult a site like this would be to make up, and whether it could be based on community-fed data (you could give ratings to certain roads for nice views and lighting and so on, and it would have an algorithm that took these ratings into account when making up routes).

Nevertheless, I am enjoying cycling, especially cycling new places. Three longish (30 or 45 mins) seems like a nice amount of cycling to do in a day now, although I still get off and walk up hills sometimes.

Uni:
It is going well, but still not as quickly as I would like. I wanted to have Ch 2 done by last Thursday, but it is still half-finished. I feel okay about it, though. I will feel better when I hand it in.

There aren't too many distractions this week, as I don't need to prepare for tutorials. A big pile of marking just came in, but I'm actually feeling rather enthusiastic about it - I'm looking forward to seeing which questions my students have developed, and I think there will be a few good ones there.

Nature:
The flowers are so pretty! Oh! They are everywhere, and I just want to look at them and look at them until my eyes hurt. I am so amazed! I want more growing things in our garden. Hopefully there will be planting soon, when I have a weekend free.

Election:
*sob*

People:
There are so many lovely people! Some of them I haven't seen for forever and a day, but I am trying to remember that it's ok, because now I am one of those people who has friends that last for more than a year, and so I can always see people later, when we are all a little less busy. Still, I have been doing a bit of fretting for some of my people who are rather beset by the world, and have been doing a bit of Missing. The nice thing is, though, that now I am better at following up Missing with Seeing, rather than Abandoning All Hope.

That is all!
*waves*

Thanks Phil.

Quiz, with reference to peas, ( behind the cut )

I am a bit ill today, and hence not doing anything exciting.

In other news: how nice that people are trying to make niftier bicycles! (but i am still in love with the sturdy and old-fashioned indian bikes here.)

I find this unbelievably cool. It has now become one of my aims to either have little enough stuff or enough friends who are very enthusiastic about bicycles to do all my moves this way. I also like it that one of these bicycles has a pirate flag on it.

I get so excited when I find extra ideas (feasible or less so) that fit into my idea of cool - the niftiness of doing things without waste, through cooperation, solutions that are beautiful and fun and imaginative.